0‑1 away to the standard of Paris Saint-Germain. Nobody will pretend this was a scandal; the gap is real, it is measurable, and closing it is a project rather than a team talk.
Caspar Jander was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Ask anyone on the way out what separated the sides and you will get one name: Samuel Essende. 2‑0 against Winterthur, and the applause at the whistle was mostly his.
“Some mornings you wake up and you are still a long way from everything you know.” It is not the football and it never was; Young Boys are dealing with a man who wants a different country.
A player who expected to start watched it instead. The manager will call it a decision for the team; Lewin Blum will call it something else in private.
Clubs make promises constantly and the page usually only hears about them when they are broken. This one was honoured, and the dressing room noticed that faster than any supporter did.
“We earned that. I asked them for a reaction and I got one, and now I want the same again on Saturday.” Noah Comert on a 2‑0 afternoon that pleased him more than he was prepared to show.
Nobody at Young Boys will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
$7.7M on the table at Besiktas. The manager wanted him, the board agreed a number, and the only voices still to be heard are the ones at the other club.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Galatasaray have kept their man, and Young Boys go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
The number the board signed off was not enough. It has been asked again and raised its own offer to $2.9M — a club that wants Liam Chipperfield enough to be asked twice.
Facinet Conté was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
“I was told straight, and I would rather have it straight.” The manager at Young Boys has been clear about where Ryan Andrews stands, which is more than many ever get.
With 5 players away on international duty the sessions are small and the manager can actually hear himself. It is the one break in the season, and it never quite feels like one.
In brief
The dugoutSamuel Essende has become a man the manager trusts
92 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Young Boys lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Facinet Conté is 22, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
“I watch every Young Boys game from here. That says everything about where my head is.” The loan at Sion runs its course, but his heart never made the trip.
It is never announced and it is entirely visible: the biggest afternoons of the season keep containing him. A press box works this out long before anybody at the club confirms a word of it.
Nobody will confirm this and nothing else explains the last month of selections. A costly error buys a player a period of being second choice that is always longer than the error was.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Armin Gigović signs something — a contract at Young Boys or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Young Boys. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
123 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Young Boys lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“I have given this everything, but my family is not here and neither am I, not really.” A footballer can be coached out of bad form. Nobody has ever been coached out of this, and Young Boys know it.
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
“I watch every Young Boys game from here. That says everything about where my head is.” The loan at Sion runs its course, but his heart never made the trip.
Every manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say Cédric Zesiger is on it.
Nobody will confirm it and the team sheets confirm it every week. One error has bought him a spell as second choice that is already longer than the error deserved.
Young Boys had done everything except persuade the man himself. He stays at Wil, and the manager goes back to the drawing board with the money still in the bank.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Young Boys have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
The fee is $2.1M, the contract is signed, and the argument about whether he is worth it can begin. Thun drove a hard bargain; time will say who won it.
The deadline has passed and the squad is the squad. 2 arrived, 5 left, and everything else printed about this club last month was a rumour that stayed one.
“I have ambitions, and I would like the club to share them.” Nobody has asked to leave and nobody has been shown the door — but a player chooses that sentence carefully, and a boardroom hears it exactly as it was meant.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Marc Gutbub is living that version at Young Boys, and it tends to show in the first month.
The most common injury in the game and the most rushed back from. Young Boys will quote 16 days and will be careful with it, because the second one is always worse than the first.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Alan Virginius was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Miguel Jacquet was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
The music was off and the showers ran late. What was said in that dressing room stays there, but Saturday will publish the minutes.
The dugout14 Sep 2026
The view from the dugout
“We will look at it, we will learn from it, and we go again.” The three sentences every manager keeps for a 0‑1 defeat, delivered by Noah Comert to a room that had heard them before.
The system has changed and his position has not. A footballer can improve his form; he cannot improve the manager’s formation, and that is the whole of the problem.
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Darian Maleš’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Young Boys needing him to play as if none of it matters.
The shape wanted a different profile against this opponent, which is a real football answer and no comfort at all to the man it is about. He did nothing wrong and he did not play.
Numbers do not stay secret in a dressing room and never have. He is not asking for more than he is worth; he is asking why somebody beside him is worth more, and at Young Boys that is a harder question to answer.